Boston Marathon

The Boston Marathon is today. Security is jacked WAY up this year after what happened last year.

I remember this event in detail. The aftermath especially. The media getting everything wrong. The over reach of the police. Illegal search and seizures. Military style reaction to find one kid.

They still try to gloss over the over reaction. Basically rolling tanks.

It was also the depth of the surveillance that was in place all the time that led them to the culprits.

All of this was while I was in my early chapters of this novel. As I work the second draft I can see it in there.

--The Lesson: We need more Andy Griffith and Less SWAT.

The Warlock

I just finished reading The Warlock by Michael Scott.

This is the 5th book in the series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel.

Please note that this series has nothing to do with the Harry potter series.

The lesson I learned from this book is that you have to keep moving the plot forward.

This entire book only advanced the story a little even though the characters were running their asses of, going all over the place.

--The series is losing me. I hope the next one is better.

Conflict

I like books the hook me in the first few pages with a conflict that you MUST keep reading to find out what happens.

There is lots of different kinds of Conflict. The image from Writingfix.com shows a couple simple examples.

Alfred Hitchcock liked to establish conflict early and crank up tension. Show the ticking bomb under train seat and then the boring baseball conversation the people sitting on the bomb is suddenly something else.

I have actually read books where the conflict was not clear or present and I usually dislike them. Other stories have a conflict but a weak protagonist that does not resolve the conflict.

I like protagonists with heavy conflicts, striving to resolve it, going after the wrong resolutions, suffering setbacks or full reversals, or maybe even full failures.

--For me, as a reader, the bigger the conflict the better.